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The infantile cowardice of our time which demands an external pattern, a nonhuman authority.

Archibald MacLeish

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Archibald MacLeish
Age: 89 †
Born: 1892
Born: May 7
Died: 1982
Died: April 20
Lawyer
Librarian
Playwright
Poet
Poet Lawyer
University Teacher
Writer
Glencoe
Illinois
Time
Cowardice
Pattern
External
Demands
Patterns
Atheism
Demand
Authority
Infantile

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The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
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Poetry is the art of understanding what it is to be alive.
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The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.
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Young poets are advised by their elders to avoid the practice of journalism as they would wet socks and gin before breakfast.
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The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity.
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Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man.
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A poem should not mean but be.
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The map of America is a map of endlessness, of opening out, of forever and ever. No man's face would make you think of it but his hope might, his courage might.
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There is only one thing more painful than learning from experience and that is not learning from experience.
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A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
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Man can live his truth, his deepest truth, but cannot speak it.
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The American journey has not ended. America is always still to build ... West is a country in the mind, and so eternal.
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Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England.
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Love becomes the ultimate answer to the ultimate human question.
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There is no dusk to be, There is no dawn that was, Only there's now, and now, And the wind in the grass.
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Poets... are literal-minded men who will squeeze a word till it hurts.
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The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it.
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There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream.
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See the world as it truly is, small and blue, beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats.
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America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them.
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